


cold on a beach (melbourne, 2018)

by velleitees



Category: Phandom/The Fantastic Foursome (YouTube RPF)
Genre: Canon Compliant, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-24
Updated: 2018-08-24
Packaged: 2019-07-01 22:55:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,051
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15783801
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/velleitees/pseuds/velleitees
Summary: how is it cold on a beach in australia i want to speak to the manager.





	cold on a beach (melbourne, 2018)

**Author's Note:**

> perhaps everything i write involves a hotel and/or sleeping. also, the australian instastories have my entire heart and soul.

_We can go to the beach_ , Dan had said. _We’re already up, anyway._

Eleven hours before, they land in Melbourne, Australia, and their legs hurt from the lack of space that came from sixteen hours forty-thousand feet in the sky, and maybe they haven’t had a proper conversation in twelve hours (“ _ISpy doesn’t count_ ”), so maybe they do just that, and maybe their mouths make up for it in one of the stalls in the airport bathrooms. They get made fun of, shoved around mockingly, but Dan just shrugs, reddens for the slightest of seconds, laughs along with them while Phil doesn’t bother with excuses because there’s no point denying it.

 

Seven hours before and—

Goodnight is murmured hastily into the two a.m. air, and Dan is already halfway across the room before Phil can say it back. There are dark rings under his eyes in the glimpse he sees of Dan he doesn’t care to point out; Phil sees the same ones in the mirror when he’s brushing his teeth.

(A text message stirs his phone at exactly two thirty-three a.m. aest, reads: _love you_.)

 

And three hours before—

Phil wakes from slumber to the sound of his phone ringing. It was a fitful sleep that leaves his head hurting when he finally puts the phone to his ear, and Dan’s voice is too loud through the microphone, _too_ _awake_. “Why are you not sleeping?” Phil mutters, hiding deeper into his blankets. When he glances over at the clock, the numbers startle.

“I couldn’t.” It's quiet for a bit, and Phil almost falls back asleep before Dan adds, quickly: “I woke you up, didn’t I?”

“Go back to bed. We need this.”

Sheepish shuffling. “Open your door?”

He sighs, putting his glasses on. “Wait a moment.” The eyes that meet his after dodging the labyrinthine maze of suitcases to the door are pretty and wide and unblinking, and Phil swallows, opening the door wider, less sleep-drunk and more sleep-sober as Dan walks in. The door shuts behind him with a murky thud. “Dan—” The frigidness of the room sends a shiver up his spine, but maybe that’s just him, or maybe that’s just the coldness of his hand as Dan raises it to touch him.

“Come back to bed.” He reaches out across the void, twining his fingers with Dan’s, pulling gently until they fall back onto the mattress.

But he doesn’t fall into slumber. He watches Dan’s eyes flutter shut, looking too disgracefully beautiful in a way that has Phil’s chest burn copiously, and he’s fascinated, unable to stop himself from skimming his lips against his jaw, from twirling a finger around the stray curl on his forehead. “You need to sleep,” he’s saying, and his voice is hoarse, his syllables clumsy, like he hasn’t been using them enough. Dan hums. “Can I do anything?”

“We can go out—,” the fabric of the duvet rustles, deafening, rippling around their bodies. The sides of his face are what Dan’s fingers graze next, and Phil swallows, visibly, until finally he reaches out to hold his wrist in place, studying him. “We’re allowed to,” Dan points out.

“Everyone else—”

“ _Asleep_.” Dan is smelling of shampoo, hair slightly damp against the pillow, and he’s curling his body against Phil’s. “We can go to the beach,” he says. “We’re already up, anyway.”

The suggestion hangs in the air very, very mildly, and there’s no demand in his words, Dan moving in until their lips barely touch, just the warmth of his breath against his chin. “We don’t know our way around,” he replies, softly, or maybe anxiously, breath stammering, “we’ll get lost.”

Dan lets out a huff, eyes fluttered shut, and Phil shifts, pulling the duvet over his body, making sure he’s comfortable, he’s safe. Lavender light leaks in through the gap between the curtain, and it bathes his shadows in a sickly glow. It fills him with so much content to be able to look at him like this. Just beside him, hair in autumn shades, skin impossibly soft beneath his touch. Dan’s eyes don’t stay closed for long because he’s looking up at him again, and his irises are dark, so dark, _too dark_ , and he’s cupping his jaw and dragging him in, and the jeans he wears scrape against the sheets, or his hands, or his palms. He pulls away briskly when Phil starts to push back, smirking. “We can continue if you go to the beach with me,” Dan says, almost breathlessly while Phil leans against the headboard. Heat stings his neck uncomfortably, and it makes him flustered.

“We can’t.”

“We can,” Dan tugs on his hand, and it’s the voice in low vowels again, the voice Phil can’t resist, and the cheeky smile he offers makes him look away for the briefest of moments. He pushes himself up on his elbows, angling his head to search Phil’s face. “I won’t get us lost, I promise. You trust me, right?”

“— That could be up for contention,” Phil sighs, defeated, already getting out of bed. “ _Depends_.”

 

 

 _Like this_ , he thinks later, is the way Dan looks oceanward. It’s cold, so cold, as cold as the water or the wind that wraps around them — and Phil is in love, so in love, and it almost hurts.

The ocean is a graveyard, full of salt, windy, symphonic in a way that only the water knows, and the salt stings their eyes, their lips, and it’s cold, so cold. They walk side by side, and their shoes sink in the sand, all that sand. Phil shivers, and it burns to breathe. All there is is all that ocean, and all the absence of people. He blinks, and the glasses are helpful in keeping the sand from his eyes, but not Dan’s — he’s squinting, westerlies robbing away all the heavy huffs that leave him.

He sniffs, strangely, the salt burning his throat. A wave washes against the shore, swallowing sand back into its mineral blues. “You’re going to get sick.” Dan doesn’t reply. The fingers that hold his phone are stiff, and they press the wrong buttons and the wrong apps, but he eventually presses record, and his consonants becomes disembodied by the wind — _Dan, we’re upside down right now._ His laugh is distorted. It makes Dan turn, confused for a bit, then scoff.

A dimple craters his left cheek as Phil moves closer. “God — good one, Phil.” His words are cynical, but he shakes his head, smiling.

Phil saves the video but doesn’t post it. Just stares at the young man as he looks oceanward.

“You look good,” says Phil, absentmindedly. “It’s nice to look at you.”

His shrug is dismissive, despite the sharp breath Phil hears him suck in.

Around them, the air gets colder. Dan wraps his arms around himself tighter, so Phil holds his hand out, until he feels knuckles underneath the skin he runs his thumb over. It doesn’t do much — it’s purposeless, really, Phil knows, though that doesn’t hinder the need to reach out.

“It’s cold,” it comes out bitterly, as bitter as the hot coffee they consumed on the way there. His lips are pursed, and his arms are crossed, and Phil snaps a quick picture just because.

He snorts, looking Dan up and down, like he’s managed to dress warmer than he did (denim jackets, both salt-water dampened).  “I mean we _are_ upside down.” Dan rolls his eyes, tugging on his sleeve, searching for warmth Phil can hardly give. “Let’s go back,” he flinches as ice-cold fingers creep under the hem of his shirt, “we’ll be warmer there at least.”

“Wait—”

It starts too soon and ends too quickly. Precisely three seconds and two-hundred and four milliseconds, the salt that stings his lips, the fingers that tug at the loops of his jeans, and the citrus smell Dan wears is pervasive against the seawater when he leans into his space. Phil stares, dazed somehow. The eyes that look at him cause a turmoil in his chest. “Why—” there’s nobody around, just the lament of a stormy sea and all its shipwrecks and sirens. The proximity is allaying.

“Just a thanks,” Dan murmurs, stepping in, as if he couldn’t get close enough before, and Phil doesn’t step back. “For — you know," a shrug, "coming with me.”

Everything Dan seems to do tugs at his strings — and Phil, feelings like the messy ocean, says, “ _Of course_.”

 

 

There’s the rain and the hail that falls and falls just outside the warmth of an Uber. They sit close, knees touching, fingers inching forward but never meeting. It’s quiet even after they get back to the hotel. This time Phil goes to Dan’s room, his bathroom, watching as Dan removes his clothes, his shirt, and he’s almost soaked down to the bone. Words aren’t spoken, because they’re unneeded, and a heavy kind of relief inhabits his ribcage. At what, Phil’s not sure on, but they stand under the spray of the shower, trying to get warm. Even though Dan is blurry around the edges without the clarity of his glasses, he’s a figure he can make out just by touch, or just by the way his contours fill the haziness. The water washes away all that sand and all that salt, and it spirals down, down, down the drain.

The mattress is large enough for both their bodies, and the glass of water is passed between them then emptied in a matter of seconds. Dust shimmers in the yellow light. The room drowns in similar hues, all warm and glowing and contrasting against the cold that shrouds Melbourne just thirteen floors below. Phil’s eyes never leave Dan, not even when his back is turned toward him.

In a month or two at most, they’ll be home. But home in itself has become a sort of noun full of faults and irregularities, full of discrepancies. Things will be weird for a while when they get back, and it’ll take two, maybe three weeks to settle, for their suitcases to get unpacked, for the greenery both inside and out to begin flourishing again. And then, after, the place they rent in London will become home again.

For now, though, home is where the heart is.

And now — skipped nine hours ahead on a very unfamiliar bed in a very unfamiliar city, it’s the young man asleep beside him, hair alarmingly messy — the young man who inadvertently clings on to every part of him that Phil, without any semantically disillusioned adjective, thinks—

 _home_.

 

 

(Phil wakes from slumber to his phone stirring. Dan is asleep, and his legs are tangled with his, and it’s hot, too hot; the shirt he wears gets removed and thrown on the ground. Dan stirs beside him, and Phil doesn’t mind it unlike the phone that stirs on his bedside table. The messages are glanced over, some replied, others left unread. It’s an inane thing to do, he knows, but Dan looks at rest for the first time in a long while he can’t bear to wake him up. But he needs to. It takes a few kisses on his shoulder for him to stir again. “ _Dan_.”

“Five more minutes,” he mutters, as he gets closer, closer, closer. Phil sighs, begrudgingly pulling the covers over him. It’s entirely foolish, he knows this, too, but Dan crawls on top of him and all forms of rational thought leave at once.

" _Five more minutes._ "

“Yeah, yeah—”

There’s an open simplicity to that voice that is assuaging, a nonchalance that has been uncommon for a long while now that it puts him at of ease. The duvet moulds shallowly into the body he pats underneath.

“I mean it,” Phil utters, but the fight bleeds out in all the vowels that slip through the crack between his lips.

Dan dares to peer out from under the covers. An eyebrow is raised. “Do you?”

“We’ll get room service for breakfast,” a look in Phil’s direction and he’s _gone_. Maybe it would be somewhat embarrassing if he cared for how his heart stopped and restarted. Dan stares, suspicious.

“ _Fine_ — but it better be fucking worth it. Like, a full four-course meal with barista coffee and good maple syrup. _Promise_.”

He laughs, staring back. “I promise.”)

**Author's Note:**

> find me i'm [velleitees](https://velleitees.tumblr.com/) on tumblr :)


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